About Link Newspaper

Link Newspaper

Overview

Link Newspaper — known to its readers as The Link — is a South Asian community newspaper based in Surrey, British Columbia, in the Vancouver metropolitan area, publishing in English for the region's large South Asian population. Its website is thelinkpaper.ca, and it is the anchor title in this directory for that domain. The paper appears in Canadian media directories as a weekly, owned in the late 2000s by South Asian Link Publishing Ltd., and it has been part of the South Asian media scene in the Lower Mainland for decades: a 2014 regulatory hearing transcript described one of its publishers as having decades of experience in South Asian media in Surrey, including publishing The Link alongside related titles.

The Link's role is best understood through its setting. Surrey is one of Canada's principal South Asian cities, a place where Punjabi-speaking and other South Asian communities are not a minority niche but a central part of civic life, commerce and politics. An English-language South Asian paper there speaks to readers across the community's languages and generations — immigrants who follow politics in both Canada and India, Canadian-born readers who may not read Punjabi or Hindi publications, and businesses that need to reach both. Media monitoring of British Columbia's 2024 provincial election found exactly that role in action: The Link in Surrey was noted as providing balanced coverage of the election, giving both the governing NDP and the Conservatives space to present their platforms to its readers.

This profile is deliberately careful about the paper's record. The Link is well documented in Canadian media directories from the late 2000s, in a Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hearing transcript from 2014, in bylines preserved by other websites from 2010, and in independent media analysis from October 2024. It is less extensively documented in recent reference works than some larger outlets, and its own website could not be independently re-fetched at the time of writing through the research tools available. Accordingly, figures from old directories are labelled with their year, recent activity is claimed only where a dated independent source supports it, and no current circulation, readership or ranking claim is made.

History

The clearest early documentary record of the paper is the 2009 edition of Media Names & Numbers, a standard Canadian media directory whose community and ethnic newspaper listings described The Link as an East Indian — in the terminology of the time — newspaper. The directory listed its owner as South Asian Link Publishing Ltd., its frequency as weekly, its address as Unit 101, 13463 78th Avenue, Surrey, British Columbia, and its website as thelinkpaper.ca, with Paul Dhillon named as editor. The same listing reported a circulation of 17,000 and a subscription price of 100 dollars. Those numbers are part of the paper's history as recorded in 2009; they are not a statement of its present circulation or pricing, and this profile does not present them as current.

A second, richer historical source is the transcript of a CRTC hearing held on 28 January 2014, at which a Surrey broadcasting application was presented. Introducing the applicant team, counsel described Munish Katyal as having decades of experience in South Asian media in Surrey, including publishing the newspapers "The Link," "Punjabi Link," "Voice" and "Awaaz," as well as the Link Directory, a print directory of more than 1,200 South Asian businesses in the Lower Mainland. That testimony places The Link within a small publishing family: an English-language flagship, a Punjabi-language companion suggested by the Punjabi Link title, and other community papers, supported by a business directory serving the same commercial community. It also establishes that, by 2014, the people behind The Link had been publishing in Surrey's South Asian market for a long time — long enough for their experience to be presented to a federal regulator as a credential.

The paper was also a member of the community-press ecosystem nationally; the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada's member listings have included The Link, and separately The South Asian Link Newspaper, among hundreds of ethnic-media members. Individual bylines preserved from the paper show R. Paul Dhillon writing for The Link in 2010, including an October 2010 report on a federal consultation about marriage fraud — the kind of immigration-integrity story of direct concern to South Asian families. Dhillon, a Vancouver-area journalist and filmmaker, has had extensive editing and reporting work with South Asian newspapers and magazines, according to his biography at the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame. The association between an editor of that profile and The Link in both the 2009 directory and the 2010 bylines is a consistent thread in the paper's documented history.

Content and Coverage

The Link's documented content is community journalism in English: Surrey and Lower Mainland news, British Columbia and federal politics, immigration questions, and South Asian community life. The strongest recent example is the October 2024 media-monitoring analysis published by MIREMS, a service that tracks ethnic media in Canada. Reviewing coverage of the 2024 British Columbia provincial election, the analysis contrasted the approaches of South Asian outlets and recorded that The Link in Surrey provided balanced coverage, giving both the NDP and the Conservatives space to present their platforms. In an election where South Asian voters in Surrey ridings were heavily courted, that platform-giving function — letting parties address the community directly, in a paper the community reads — is a concrete form of civic service, and the independent monitoring gives it a checkable date and source.

The 2010 marriage-fraud article shows an earlier version of the same agenda. Reporting a federal announcement by the immigration minister, the piece explained a proposed conditional visa for sponsored spouses, consultations held in Brampton, and the experiences of Canadians who said they had been deceived into marriages of convenience. For a South Asian readership, sponsorship and marriage fraud were not distant policy abstractions but live family issues, and the paper treated them as such, in explanatory detail.

More broadly, the analysis quoted above drew a useful distinction: Punjabi-language media serve that language community, while the broader South Asian media publish in English, one of India's official languages, and address the whole South Asian population. The Link, as an English paper, sits in the second group. Its natural coverage therefore spans the community's shared concerns across religious and national lines — municipal decisions in Surrey, provincial services, federal immigration rules, business and real-estate life, festivals and faith-community news, and the politics of India and Punjab insofar as they move readers in British Columbia. That breadth is an inference from its documented position and the analyses cited, stated here as an explanation of its format rather than as a catalogue of verified sections.

Audience and Reach

The Link's audience is the South Asian community of Surrey and the wider Lower Mainland. The 2009 directory figure of 17,000 circulation gives a sense of its print-era scale as recorded at the time — a substantial community weekly, distributed where South Asian readers live, work and shop — but it is a 2009 number and must not be read as a current figure. No audited current circulation or readership was found for this profile, and none is claimed.

The audience context, by contrast, is well documented and has only grown. Surrey's South Asian population is one of the largest in North America; a community report based on the 2016 census put South Asians in Metro Vancouver at about 300,000 people, around 12 percent of the region, with Surrey described as one of the world's largest South Asian enclaves and nearly 40 percent of Surrey's population identifying with South Asian heritages in more recent municipal statements. A newspaper that has published for that community from Surrey for decades is embedded in it: the Link Directory's list of more than 1,200 South Asian businesses, cited in the 2014 hearing, illustrates how deeply the publishing operation was tied into the local business community that advertises in and reads such papers.

Reach for a title like The Link should therefore be understood locally rather than numerically. Its readers are concentrated in particular neighbourhoods — Newton, Fleetwood and other Surrey districts, with spillover into Delta, Langley and Vancouver — and its value to readers, parties and advertisers lies in that concentration. The 2024 election analysis shows political campaigns and platforms being placed before its audience. This profile makes no claim that The Link is the largest South Asian paper in British Columbia; it claims, on documented evidence, that it is a long-running, recognisably established one.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital home is thelinkpaper.ca, the address listed for it in directories since at least 2009 and the website recorded in this inventory. In the print era, that site functioned as the paper's online companion; for contemporary readers it is the first place to check what The Link is publishing now, and its persistence as the paper's address across many years of listings is itself a sign of continuity. A caution belongs here: during research for this profile, the paper's website could not be re-fetched through the available research tools, which is a limitation of those tools and not evidence about the site's status. The most recent independent confirmation of the paper's activity found in research is the MIREMS analysis of its election coverage in October 2024, which discussed The Link as a publishing outlet in the present tense.

Third-party traces supplement the paper's own site. Directory and aggregator listings continue to associate the Link Newspaper name with thelinkpaper.ca, the National Ethnic Press and Media Council listing keeps The Link among its members, and the paper's older bylines survive in web archives — including the 2010 immigration report discussed above. Readers who need certainty about the paper's current frequency, formats or submission routes should go to thelinkpaper.ca directly, since community papers adjust their print and digital mix over time and third-party directories lag behind. Where this profile states facts about the paper's recent activity, they rest on the dated independent sources identified in the text, not on assumptions about the website.

Ownership and Organisation

The documented ownership record for The Link is dated but consistent. Media Names & Numbers in 2009 listed South Asian Link Publishing Ltd. as the owner, with the paper produced from Surrey. The 2014 CRTC transcript connects the title to publisher Munish Katyal, whose team told the regulator that he had decades of Surrey South Asian media experience publishing The Link, Punjabi Link, Voice and Awaaz, alongside the Link Directory. Editorially, the 2009 directory named Paul Dhillon as editor, and R. Paul Dhillon's bylines in the paper in 2010 are consistent with an editorial role in that period.

Those records describe the organisation as it stood in 2009 to 2014. This profile does not assert that the same individuals hold the same roles today, because no current, checkable source confirming present-day masthead details was found — an honest limitation that readers should bear in mind, and one the outlet's own website is best placed to resolve. What the record does support is the character of the enterprise over the documented period: an independent, Surrey-based South Asian publishing operation, running several community titles and a business directory from one local base, rather than a branch of a national chain. Its publishers' appearance before the CRTC in 2014, seeking to extend from newspapers into radio for the same Punjabi-speaking Surrey community, shows an organisation thinking of itself as a community media house across formats — print first, in The Link's case, with ambitions and expertise described under oath-like regulatory scrutiny.

Contact and Availability

The Link is reached online at thelinkpaper.ca, which readers should use for its current content and for whatever contact information the paper presently publishes. The historical contact record from the 2009 directory — Unit 101, 13463 78th Avenue, Surrey, BC V3W 0A8, telephone 604-591-5160, with an email address published at the time — is reproduced here only as a dated directory entry; addresses, numbers and inboxes for community papers change, and none of those details should be treated as current without checking the website.

Print availability historically followed the community-newspaper pattern in Surrey, with copies circulating through South Asian businesses and community locations in the Lower Mainland, on a weekly schedule as listed in 2009. Current print frequency and distribution should be confirmed on the paper's site. This directory's public business email field is left empty by policy. For researchers, the paper offers a useful case study in Canadian ethnic media: documented in national directories, examined in a federal regulatory transcript, and still being read closely enough in October 2024 for independent monitors to cite its election coverage as the balanced example among its peers.